You need to be advertising and marketing your home-based business, but what does it all mean? You need customers. You need sales! But where do you start?

FFA Pages

Banners

Traffic Exchange Programs

Reciprocal Linking

These are just some of the ways for your home-based business to be advertising and marketing online (meaning on the Internet). But, what do they mean?

FFA Pages -- You submit your site to a FFA page (or network of pages) and agree to get one E-mail from every other website that is listed there. Definitely not a good idea (see our Advertising/Marketing page for more details).

Banners - These are ads shown at the top (usually) of many webpages and they sometimes rotate to show a different ad each time the page is loaded.

Traffic Exchange Programs - You submit your ad to be shown to other members of the program when they load the program start page.

Reciprocal Linking - You place a link to someone's website on your site and they place a link to your website on theirs.

Content is king. Provide good content (basically, articles about your area of expertise) about your subject and sprinkle the keywords (and combos) through the page. This basic strategy will get you a higher ranking with the search engines and many more customers because you're giving them something that they need -- information!

PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising - Instead of submitting your pages for inclusion in the search engine's database, you bid on the keyword(s) that relate to your website. You can find out in advance what other sites have bid for a particular keyword and then decide if you want to outbid the number one spot or maybe bid a little less and get the number two, three, or four spot (or lower if the keyword is expensive).

Ezines/Newsletters - These are delivered through E-mail and can be either plain text or HTML with full graphics. Although they can sometimes be expensive, you can get free ads by writing articles about your subject area and contribute them to the ezines. Why would you want to give them away? Because you can put in a "Resource Box" at the end of each article. At the very least this box will contain your name, website address, and a brief one or two line "bio" about you (some ezines allow more room). See, free online advertising for your home-based business!